From Sarah Kishawi, Evi Evloyias and Vicki Klimou, Elementary School Faculty

Miss! Are we going to the science lab today?” This is a question that we often hear in our second-grade classroom. Once the students hear the response of “Yes, we are going!” our young learners' eyes fill with relief, excitement and curiosity. They wonder: “What are we going to discover today?” 

The science lab has been their immersive world where they are given the opportunity for creative play, discovery, design, and scientific exploration. As most of us know, a scientist is someone who questions their surroundings, develops their hypothesis, tests their question, uses measuring tools, controls their variables as best as possible, collects data (written, visual and numerical), analyzes their data, and designs models that represent their findings. Our second graders have not been told any of this - but rather, they have EXPERIENCED all of this. 

Here is an image of what the science lab looks like on an average day - You walk into the science lab and see about 10  working stations with a variety of materials each station nicely organized and ready for students to begin discovering.  At times you might see measuring tools such as beakers, droppers, rulers, or graduated cylinders at each station. Other times, it’s materials such as soil, rocks, sediments, sand, sticks…or even owl pellets! Once children walk in, their heads begin to spin around and they inquisitively observe their stations. Children always enter this classroom having a question in mind. They know that they are in the science lab for a very specific purpose: To find an answer to that question - an answer that is based on EVIDENCE. The students all begin to distribute themselves to their stations like dancers setting up themselves on stage. They know that they have a big job to do with their science lab partner. The room fills with chatter and murmurs of children.  If you walk around and listen carefully, you begin to hear phrases such as:

“My hypothesis is that this will happen because…” 

“Let’s use these materials to try and make it work” 

“Did you see the erosion?”

“Miss! Look what happened!” 

“I think that happened because…” 

“Oh YAY! It worked this time!” 

“Oh my god! Did you see what happened? That’s SO COOL!”

Following that, you begin to see children picking up their pencils and enthusiastically recording what they observed in both writing and in drawings. At times, you might even see the students enthusiastically jumping up and down after completing a lab. It is an ideal scenario for teachers - a class of fully engaged learners where students are doing the learning and the discovering on their own. 

Ranging from concepts in earth science, physical science, and life science, our second graders have built all the skills of the scientific method. Moreover, they have become proficient at building models that represent the scientific phenomena they learned about. The list of experiments, models, and trials our second graders have conducted is immense and cannot be justly recorded into one story - but the purpose of this story is to shine a light on all their efforts and hard work as scientists. 

This story started off with phrases of what is heard in the science lab. It will end with phrases that are said directly from students to the teacher after a science lab: “Miss, thank you so much! I loved the science lab today. I learned so much. My brain got stronger today.” Phrases like these are what keep us going back to the science lab and what make teaching a wonderful job.

- The Second Grade Team